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TOOLS PRINT E-MAIL JUNE 26, 2008, MEMORY: A VIBRANT MESSAGE TO THE WORLD BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Mr. Leo Melamed who I must admit to being uncertain how to introduce. He is probably best known for his role as the former Chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for creating the futures market, and for being a leading financial figure. We've invited him today to speak to us, though, because of other things that he has done in his life, specifically how he has changed or helped to create and then changed the institution I work at, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Welcome to the show. LEO MELAMED: Well, thank you very much. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I wanted to start by asking you to begin and tell us what happened to you when you were nine-years-old. LEO MELAMED: Well, actually what happened to me when I was seven-years-old, because I was then in Bialystok Poland. The Germans marched in and the Nazis took over our city, and my family was captured with me as a seven-year-old child. It's a long history, but we escaped, my father, mother and I. For the next year and a half, almost two years, we transgressed most of the world in an attempt to flee from both the Nazis and the KGB. We crossed all of Siberia. We ended in Vladivostok. We took a Junk boat to cross to Japan, and we ended up in the United States when I was nine-years-old. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And that's when you finally came here. If you could also help our audience understand, who was your father and your parents? Tell us a little bit about your life in Poland before the war. LEO MELAMED: Okay, well, as I said, I was born in Bialystok, which was a second largest city in Poland, actually, with a very large population of Jews. My parents were both professional school teachers. My father was a mathematician and some of his math books were actually being used in schools. He and my mother were both involved with the creation of the very first Yiddish school that was sanctioned by the Polish government as a parochial school that could authorize full education from public school and eventually the children could enter gymnasium, which is high school. They were involved in that movement. They were Bundists, which is the Socialist wing, the Jewish wing of the Socialist Party, and teachers. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And how did they manage to leave? How did they understand -- because many Jews who would soon come under incredible risk to their lives and many who would die, didn't flee. How did your family know that they should go? LEO MELAMED: Most didn't flee because you-- a) you didn't know how long this horror would last. No one could possibly imagine the nightmare it would represent. That was something just unimaginable. Most people remained; [they] didn't know where to go. In our case, I would attribute the escape to my father's own genius in that he ran first because he was a city councilman. As a city councilman he was advised that the Germans would use him and the other councilmen as hostages, particularly because he was Jewish. The advice was for him and the other 20 odd Bialystok council members to leave for what everyone thought was an interim period. No one believed that this was a forever situation so he left. Subsequently my mother and I were, of course, left at home with what eventually turned out to be the Nazi regime. They did come, the Gestapo did come looking for him but, of course, fortunately he wasn't around. Eventually Stalin and Hitler made a pact dividing Poland. Bialystok became a part of the Russian rule. The German army marched out to go to Warsaw and the Russian army marched in. When the Russian army marched in, all the councilmen that had left returned -- except my father who didn't trust the Russians any more than he trusted the Germans. Instead we got a message from him to take the last train out of Bialystok and meet him in Wilno [Vilnius], which was Lithuania at the time. We went in the middle of the night. The borders were closing. We managed to just get across in time. It was a kind of a harrowing experience but I was only seven so I wasn't in fear, my mother was. It turned out that the Russians, just like my father thought, came looking for him as well because he was a well known anticommunist having written many papers on that. They weren't happy with him anyway. The KGB came after him, but by then he wasn't there either. The three of us met in Wilno [Vilnius], and from then on the trek began. Lithuania, then actually Russia again, because my father was right the Germans came right back and took Poland again and took all of it including Bialystok. So that's how we escaped. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Your father somehow had insight and it saved your life and your mothers. LEO MELAMED: A brilliant man. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: How did you manage to get a visa to travel, because many Jews, even those who did try to flee, found themselves stuck at borders? LEO MELAMED: Yes, well, we didn't have any visa to travel so that it was always dicey and it was always a scary thing. My father actually lived in the forests of Lithuania most of the time. My mother and I were more or less safe. My mother got a job for a little while in a Yiddish school in Wilno [Vilnius]. But eventually what happened was that my father and some large number of other Jews learned that there was a possibility for an exit visa to Japan courtesy of Chiune Sugihara, the now famous Japanese Council General of Lithuania who is the Japanese Schindler in effect. He gave out 3,000 exit visas to Japan, to those that were in Kovno [Kaunas] and we managed to be lucky enough to get one. That visa allowed us, at least theoretically, to leave Russia for Japan. We trekked across Siberia with the visa. It was, again, very dicey and nobody knew on the trains and byways as we traveled -- it took a long time -- whether we were ever going to get there or not. But we did. We ended up, as I said, on a Junk boat across the Japanese sea to Japan. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And I'll skip ahead a little now so that we can talk about your role in creating the Committee On Conscience and why you feel that was important. As a youngster growing up then in the United States, and then in your professional life, you succeeded brilliantly. You also became involved in what was an extraordinary effort at the time to create this United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a living memorial to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust, right in the middle of Washington, D.C. Can you talk about what role you played there? LEO MELAMED: Well, yes. I must say that I felt a duty to do what I could to preserve the memory of the millions that had died, among which were, of course, my entire family except for my immediate family of my father and mother. All our relatives were, in fact, put into the Bialystok Synagogue on July 2nd, 1941. They, together with another 850 Jews of the neighborhood, were locked into the synagogue, which was hosed down by gasoline and burned with everyone dying. And that's where all my relatives perished. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: All your aunts, uncles, cousins. LEO MELAMED: Everybody. Of course the rest of the community suffered an even more dire death, perhaps, in the gas chambers. But at any rate I was duty bound in my life to preserve that memory and to make sure that whatever I could to prevent it from happening again. When the Museum was in its formation, not at the very beginning, but when it was getting near time to being built I requested the President, that was the first George Bush, and I was a well known personality so that I could literally go to one of the cabinet secretaries and ask that my name be submitted for approval to become a Council member, which the President did. You can only get that by appointment, but fortunately I could and did. It was at that moment in time that it was most important to be a Council member because we were in the formative stages of building the Museum and in fact I recognized, if I may go on, the fact that while the Museum represented one of the three things that Elie Wiesel had accomplished in getting the space on the Mall for a Museum to be built. The other was to hold a memorial, a national Day of Remembrance at the Capitol once a year, and that we could accomplish. But no one was able to accomplish the third item on his agenda, which was the Committee On Conscience. To me, at any rate, the Committee On Conscience was perhaps the most important element of the three, because it's one thing to remember the past, it's quite another to protect the future. I thought that the Committee On Conscience could act as a moral weight whenever and wherever it witnessed the potential of genocide to shout out. With its own authority as being the Holocaust Memorial Museum, after all, that authority would carry a strong voice and a strong message to the governments of the world to look out. And so I undertook the effort. I was kind of a lone voice, but I undertook the effort under the Chairman then Bud Meyerhoff and later on Miles Lerman. Ultimately the Committee was created. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And that happened in 1995? LEO MELAMED: Yes. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you also served as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1991, I believe, until 2005. LEO MELAMED: That is true. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And a member of the Committee On Conscience. LEO MELAMED: Yes, and I was also a member of the Executive Committee for most of that period of time. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Have you been pleased with what the Museum has been -- it's hard to say “pleased” on a topic like responding to genocide -- but have you been proud of what the Museum has been able to do? LEO MELAMED: It's been unbelievably successful in terms of its missions. In fact none of us, at the beginning, could have possibly foreseen -- maybe Elie Wiesel, could have possibly foreseen…no, I think he said he couldn't either -- the enormous values that this Museum has produced not only nationally, of course nationally most import, but internationally as well. The achievements that it can boast in terms of remembrance, in terms of prevention, and in terms of education, these were not subjects that we could hope for when we first started a Museum that was merely to create a depository for the memory. That memory is, today, a vibrant message to the world. My God, 26 million people have come to see the memory and they leave there, they leave there with a different feeling than they came in with. They carry forward that memory for the purposes that it deserves to be used. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And how did a group-- because the Museum was founded by a number of people who were survivors of the Holocaust, people like yourself who had either lost their entire extended family or who themselves had suffered enormously in the camps. How do you think they were able to come up with this vision for an institution that was so much more than even, as you said, even they could imagine it would be at the time? LEO MELAMED: Well, it was a great deal of foresight that is, you know, it's historical now but at the time you have to applaud one man's vision -- and that would be Elie Wiesel, in my view. He had a few people around him like Bud Meyerhoff and Miles Lerman and Ben Mead (Benjamin Mead), who together became a small band of idealists that felt they could prevail. You had to have an audacity. You had to have a will. You had to have the credibility. These were all very accomplished people in the United States. Elie Wiesel had received a Nobel Peace Prize, and the rest of them were very well known in the community. So it was a band of people that, highly unusual, but that's how these things happen. When you have three, four, five maybe a half a dozen people it can move mountains, and they prevailed on the United States Government to give them a space on the Mall. This is an incredible, incredible achievement. Of course, the money came from the community, mostly Jews, but that's another story. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today, and just to also thank you in the larger sense for being a part of the creation of this institution and the honor we all feel who work here today. LEO MELAMED: Well, thank you. It's my honor to do so. NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you'll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.